That 70s Show: Haunted
by Thor2000
Summary: Just testing the water for a much requested sequel to That 70s Show: Horror Movie. Whether or not this gets any hits will determine if I go any further. I'm tired of doing requests that don't get hits.
1. Chapter 1

The sky was a mixture of light blue and gray. The street down below was covered in the dry leaves of early October rattling up and down the street, around trees, under cars and getting caught in hedges and bushes. Another breeze whisked then through the Forman's yard, through the Pinciotti's on the corner and across an angle toward the Kutcher house. The trees in the neighborhood were bare, their empty limbs reaching up to the sky barren of their green summer foliage. It wasn't Halloween yet, but the neighborhood kids were already wearing plastic masks and scaring each other as they walked up the street to school. Along they way, the stomped through, crushing the dry leaves underfoot or raking them into the gutters at the edge of the curb. Kitty Forman had come down the driveway to get her morning newspaper. She stopped to beam a smile toward the children of her neighbors and regretted the fact she'd never be a grandmother. She so missed her own children. Laurie had vanished unto the underground of Chicago a few years ago… never to be seen again. Her youngest child, Eric… Well, he was another story she barely talked about. The neighborhood parents even talked about her being a bit off since his disappearance. He went off to a high school party several years ago, happy and smiling to be with his true love and best friends, and had never returned. To this day, no one was exactly sure what had happened to him. Kitty just faked her smile through her sorrow, took up the newspaper from her leaf-covered driveway and turned round in her furry slippers and bright pink robe to head back into the house, carrying the newspaper by the tip of its plastic cover. When she rolled the back door to the side, she caught the attention of her husband pouring himself a cup of coffee.

"Here's the newspaper…" She replied a bit matter-of-factly. "What would you like for breakfast?" She pulled her frying pan out from under the stove, placed it on the burner and turned on the heat. "I found this new thing at the store. It's like scrambled eggs from a carton. It's much easier than whipping the eggs myself."

"Kitty, you know I can't stand that processed stuff." He sat at the kitchen table and slipped the newspaper from its wrapper, shifting through it for the local news. "I'll just take coffee and toast." The curmudgeonly seventy-two year old was not enjoying his retirement as much as he had liked. He had a GI pension paying his bills, his house was paid for, he had taken Kitty on trips to Florida, the Grand Canyon and Mount Rushmore and yet, there was still something missing. He looked up to the empty seat before him and imagined the ghost of his son there. He could still picture him there. His gawky skinny frame, that cock-eyed smirking grin, that god awful lump of hair piled on his head and his constant insipid Star Wars references… just thinking about the pain in the ass made him want to reach out and smack him.

"No, you got to have some breakfast…" Kitty opened the refrigerator and took out the eggs. She took two eggs out from the carton and smacked them into the frying pan, dropping the shells in the trash under the sink. "How about bacon?"

"Don't worry about it." Red looked over at her. "I'm doing just fine."

"Good morning, Mrs. Forman…" A voice came from behind him. Red and Kitty turned round to Steven Hyde staying with them. The forty-something former felon just ambled over to the coffeepot to pour himself some coffee to wake his brain. Gone were the black rock-and-roll t-shirts, the torn t-shirts and boots. He was wearing a white shirt with a tie, tan khakis with black shoes and a tie. His curly brown hair was still there, but cut shorter than it was in his youth and joined by a thick bristling beard. He scowled a bit adding artificial sweetener to his caffeine. It was quite obvious that his life had taken a change into another direction since… the incident.

"Steven, how about some breakfast?" Kitty offered.

"Thanks a lot, Mrs. Forman, but I really got to be at the record shop early." He took a doughnut from the box at the table. "We've got a new shipment of records coming in plus a big Britney Spears promotion for her new album."

"Which one is she again?" Red could not keep track of all the current 90s pop stars. "Is she the one with the squeaky voice, the big chest or can't keep her clothes on?"

"She's the one who can't keep her clothes on." Hyde mugged a bit like the old Steven. "Kelso would have loved her!" He bit into his doughnut and sipped his coffee.

"I think Fez might have loved her too." Kitty was scrambling around the stovetop tossing things together. "Here you go, honey…" She gave him a sandwich with fried eggs in between two pieces of buttered toast. "Can't have you going hungry."

"Thanks a lot, Mrs. Forman…" Hyde smiled to her. She was just so wonderful to him while Red was still held a grudge against him. "See you, Red." He bit into the hasty sandwich and on out to his black 1995 Jeep out in the driveway. Red stewed at the table as his son's best friend headed off to his job. Listening to the Jeep backfiring its way down the driveway, the former Army sergeant rolled his eyes trying to keep from speaking his peace. He had a lot to ask the boy about involving his son, but he bided his time for now.

"There you see…" Kitty brought more toast to her husband. "You're talking again."

"That's not talking." Red sipped his coffee. "That's acknowledging his presence."

"Red Forman…" Kitty glared a bit. "How long are you going to harbor this grudge? We've known Steven since he was five years old! He did not kill Eric!"

"For Christ's sake, Kitty…" Red rose his voice to let loose. "Twenty years ago, Steven and the kids vanish at a party at the high school and are missing for twenty years, and then three months ago, the little creep gets flushed out of a deserted California sanitarium stoned out of his mind and screaming about ghosts and demonic clouds eating people and with no memory of the last twenty years! Just tell me, what do you think happened?"

"Red Forman, you're the biggest hypocrite in the world!!!" Kitty got his attention by laying into him. "When our son was alive, you put him through hell! If I had a dime for every time you threatened to put your foot up his ass or something, I could buy myself a car! A really nice one!!! You never liked Eric! You never liked being a dad to him! You treated him as if he wasn't even your son! The only one you really liked was Laurie and look what happed to her!!! You hated being a dad to Eric so don't sit there and grieve for the boy or even blame Steven for something that never happened! You drove Eric away!!!"

"Really…" Red looked at her nerve to chew him out. "And the others just followed him for the heck of it?"

"Well," Kitty turned round from venting her anger and poured herself some scrambled eggs. "I don't have all the answers! All I know is that Steven did not kill our son. When he says he doesn't recall getting dumped in that sanitarium, I believe him!"

"Let me say this…" Red pouted a bit and took a deep breath. Kitty stopped what she was doing to glare at him. "I admit that Steven has never wavered from that story, but why was he, Eric and the kids dumped in that place to begin with? Someone had to have taken them cross-country for that particular place and if that's the case, why would it take him twenty years to escape?" He leaned back having made his point. "Kitty, why were they there?"

Steven had been asking himself that question ever since the police and the FBI had questioned him. He fled from that place as a nineteen-year-old kid, and he was released as a forty-year old man from police custody just a week later. What had happened to his life? Why did he not have any memory of it? It was like the mystery of those three Burkittsville filmmakers who had vanished looking for the ghost of a witch in the woods. Where they going to appear in twenty years suddenly accelerated into adulthood? All he did know was he woke up in that basement, he was terrified for his life and when he stormed out, over twenty years had passed. A nineteen-year-old kid in the body of a grown man, he had missed his own graduation and the whole of the Reagan years, but his biological father had recognized him in the news, supported him in the ensuing investigation and gave him a job managing a music store. Where there had once been vinyl records was rows and rows of cassettes and now CDs. It was a good thing they were so much smaller; there were so many more new artists to keep track of from the Material girl to mullet-headed country stars. Keeping up on them was almost as hard as it was getting his GED. Heading to the music store to get ahead of the deliveryman, he nervously bit his nails and stared ahead at the people on the crosswalk. Even after twenty years, the Maple Drive exit on to Main Street was still the slowest light in Point Place, Michigan. It finally turned green, but the guy in the Le Sabre barely looked up. When he finally noticed the change and drove through, the light was red again and Steven was stuck in traffic again!

"Crap and a half!!!" He pounded the steering wheel of his jeep out of frustration. He frustratedly rolled his eyes and leaned back in the driver's seat watching the pedestrians crossing by in front of his Jeep. A guy rolling several boxes behind on a cart, a mom with a cart, several kids from the Chik Filet heading to his old high school, a coffee-sipping businessman with a briefcase and an older woman with a bag of groceries. He smirked toward the girl in the Madonna hooded sweater, her bosom spreading wide the Material Girl's likeness. Oh, to be young again to proposition her! Hyde then turned his gaze to the next young lady… his blood running cold at the sight of her. Gazing at him from the crosswalk, Jackie Burkhart peered back to Steven Hyde watching her. An evil glint to her face, her cold gaze directed upon him, she grinned heartlessly toward him and walked before the grillwork of his Jeep. Garbed almost entirely in black from head to toe, she looked just as young as the last time he saw her! Her long dark brown hair bobbing on her shoulders, her enhanced supernatural figure accentuated by the souls of the living, her presence mocked him to the core of his soul. Steven's jaw dropped as she walked by him and toward their old school!

"What? Jackie???" Steven stammered. She was quickly vanishing away from him! He tried to turn into the traffic but a silver Subaru nearly cut him off. Pounding his wheel in disgust, Hyde checked the traffic again and forgot about getting to his music store for the moment. He turned right into the traffic and peered over the cars parked along the curb alongside him. A recognizable brunette head was bobbing behind them.

"Jackie!!!" Hyde screamed for her to stop. He wasn't sure if he wanted to talk to her, but he had to stop her. He felt he had to! His black Jeep rolling unsurely down the curb, Steven looked over and around cars, trucks and vehicles between him and the sidewalk. Crossing in front of the book store to the money-lenders, Jackie looked back at him once in front of the Starbucks, her blue eyes even brighter than he recalled, her bosom larger than it ever was, and vanished behind a van blocking Hyde's view of her.

"I don't think so…" Hyde rolled quickly ahead and found himself approaching the Main Street and Prepone Street intersection, Fez's foster family once lived on this street. Instead of stopping, he flipped on his turn signal and turned sharply to stop Jackie, timing it that she'd have to collide with the side of his Jeep, but she never emerged beyond the end of the van.

"What?" Hyde reacted confused. Where'd she go? He looked down through the little tunnel shaped by the awning and the van up close together turned to look further up the street and noticed something else. Down the hill from him, strolling up the other hill on the other side of the Barbecue Place toward the houses beyond, Jackie had somehow vaulted ahead almost two blocks. She even looked back once more to see if he was still following her. She was strolling past the wood between the U-Haul place onward to the Old Bartilson House on the corner at Tisdale Drive. That old place had had a reputation of being haunted since the 1940s. No one wanted to live there since Michael Bartilson and his family swore they heard voices and experienced doors closing in the place. With Hyde getting closer, Jackie continued onward to the boarded up two-story frame house. Looking up once more, her presence passed between the trees in the front yard. Hyde stopped before the house just as she stepped up on to the front porch. Jackie looked back at him once more and passed through the front door turning into immaterial matter. His pulse racing, his breath increasing, Hyde couldn't believe what he was seeing. He was following her ghost!!!


	2. Chapter 2

2

"I swear it was her, Angie." Hyde confided in his new half-sister, Angela Barnett, and his new posse of friends and confidantes, several of them connected by relation or by consequence to the friends she had lost. "She was just as real as she was when I last saw her." He had made his few new friends after his return to Point Place and release by the FBI investigating his twenty-year disappearance, but they had not been ready to accept his tale about ghosts and spirits. Part of his exoneration was due on part to the lawyers of William Barnett, his biological father, a well-to-due African-American businessman. It was a quirky twist of fate to the young white young man to realize he had a father who was black. Barnett moved in and gave Hyde his job at one of his music stores, and with it came, Angie, his new cute yet annoying new African-American half-sister. She did the financing and accounting for the music store so that Steven could run it and on his own. She answered to him. He liked it that way. "She was…" Hyde tried to think. "Just as young as I last saw her."

"But Hyde…" Kevin Kelso was Michael Kelso's younger brother. Possibly, the only bright one out of that bunch of brain-damaged womanizers, he had actually learned from their mistakes to become a history teacher at the school and even assistant principal, using his brother, Michael, as an example of what not to do. "You said she was dead. What would her spirit be doing here in Point Place?"

"Maybe she's on vacation, heck, if I know…" Hyde mumbled. Across from him in the center sitting area of the store, Donna's younger sister, Valerie Pinciotti, had returned to Point Place to raise her son after living in California with her mother. She fumbled with a cigarette as Tammy Sue Barton leaned backward in her seat. A local policewoman with hair as red as Donna's, she only knew Hyde and Eric from her brief ownership of their Vista Cruiser. She was also romantically linked to Kevin as his fiancée.

"I've got a cousin with the Chicago Ghost-Hunters Society…" She spoke up with a toss of her red hair. "He and his friends go round after this stuff. I could give you his phone number."

"Like that'd be a help…" Valerie tossed back her blonde hair, fussing with her cigarette a bit. "Hyde… maybe she was just a hallucination. Some sort of… memory left over from your experience. You said yourself that that place was a very trying experience."

"Look, Hyde…" Loren Chapman was the new Fez in this after-hours intervention in the music store. He was of mixed Native American and French Canadian ancestry. If Valerie replaced Donna and Tammy replaced Jackie, then Kevin replaced Michael. Hyde didn't like that. If Angie replaced Laurie, it meant he was both Eric and himself now. "I'm not ready to start believing in ghosts, dude, but… you got to open up and tell us what happened that night. Come on, tell us the entire story!"

Hyde groaned and stressed with his hands while shaking his head. He'd been avoiding this tale for months. He'd given bits and pieces of it since and had only told the police and FBI what had happened, but they had never believed him. They wanted to hold him for murder, but they never quite had enough evidence to prosecute him. The most the clinical psychologists said was that Hyde was repressing a traumatic event. There was never even evidence that the others had ever been in the sanitarium near Long Beach with him. They said that Hyde may have been hiding there for years from someone, but Hyde knew that wasn't the truth.

"Do you guys recall that school dance back in 1978?" He finally broke down. "I recall it as if it was last year because it feels like last year with me. It practically was for me. That night, Kelso was flirting with Pam Macy and Jackie wanted to kill him. Eric and Donna was off by themselves, and the football team was terrorizing Fez, and I slipped them some fake… stuff." He grinned like the old Hyde. "Anyway, for some reason or another, we all ended up out of it at the school and we woke up together in the basement of that place together and pretty confused. I mean, to this day, I still have no memory of how we got there. Someone dumped us there, but to me, it was like only a few hours after the dance. For as far as we knew, we were in a strange location we'd never been before somewhere around Point Place."

"How'd you guys get there?" Kevin asked as he absorbed the tale.

"Don't you think I've studied that over and over?" Hyde rose, stepped over to the counter and took an empty Debbie Gibson CD shell for Valerie to use as an ashtray. "The only thing I can figure out is that someone knew we hung out with each other and slipped us drugs then drove or shipped us out there and dumped us the basement. The only thing I don't get is… how did they know we'd just not leave? They put us in that basement knowing we'd get lost in it!" His belated temper made him swat the sofa before sinking into it again.

"What kind of place was it?" Loren asked leaning forward in his seat.

"It was creepy and dark and spooky…" Hyde reflected back on the place. "It was like a huge maze of halls, corridors and rooms with barely any light, cold and dark with abandoned equipment, wheelchairs and… Oh god, these god-awful cadaver statures preserved in some sort of stuff. It was just the worst place to get lost in… like a horror movie brought to life… "

"Where do the ghosts come in?" Angie asked.

"Much later…" Hyde continued. "I mean… your idiot brother was very quickly getting on my nerves…" He looked to Kevin. "He thought he knew the way out, I thought I knew the way… we were just looking for a telephone, but the next thing we knew we were lost in this huge basement, and then Kelso lost Fez and Jackie, and Eric and I lost Donna, and when they did show up, it wasn't really them. Jackie appeared dressed like a nurse… she turned into Donna… Hey don't look at me like that, it happened!"

"Were you guys on the stuff down there?" Tammy asked.

"If you saw this place, you wouldn't want to be smoking anything!" Hyde's voice became a bit irritated and he gestured for effect. "This place was an experience all by itself! I mean, I was down the rabbit hole, man! I was tripping without the good part, you know. This black smoke was after Eric and me, and he saved my life from it. He saved my life… and it got him."

"So…" Kevin sighed deeply and shifted in his seat. "What do you think this smoke was?"

"Death…" Hyde looked up coldly serious. "Eric vanished into it… I'm sure everyone else did. All I know is that I was the only one who got out, and when I ran into those people, suddenly I'm being told that it's twenty years later, and I've got no memory of everything that happened in between." He turned from cold and empty to crushed and depressed, barely the figure he once was in his youth.

"Twenty years later…" Kevin looked to Hyde then shared a secret look with Loren. "You make it sound like it all happened in one night, but Hyde… You were in there for over twenty years."

"I was not in there for twenty years!" Hyde made a face of his own. "I was in there for one night. One night! I didn't realize it was twenty years later until after I left the place!" Hyde scratched his beard. "I lost twenty years somewhere man." He pointed to his face. "You think I grew this on purpose?" He circled his beard with his finger. "I just… don't recall being anywhere else between the night of the dance and the night I escaped that place."

"Isn't it possible you were slipped something that made you hallucinate?" Valerie suggested.

"The police asked me that when they tried to force me into confessing for murdering the guys…" Hyde collapsed emotionally exhausted again. "At the time, it seemed impossible, but now, I still keep wondering… but if I was, why do I feel like I never really left that place?"

"It sounds like an extremely psychologically-scarring experience." Kevin tried to support Hyde. "It'll probably take years to get over it… even if it didn't happen like you thought it had."

"But it did, man!!!" Hyde snapped and jumped to his feet again. He had been struggling to come to terms with what had happened to him and what others told him had happened for weeks! The more days that went by, he was starting to doubt himself more and more. His memories and feelings were tearing him up inside. Maybe that's why he thought he saw Jackie.

"Hyde, just…" Angie tried be more a sister to him by becoming sympathetic. "Go home, I'll lock up the store." She stood behind him at the counter.

"No, I'll lock it up…" He felt everyone standing behind him. "I need to prove to myself that I can kick this. I mean… I'm still me."

"You sure, dude?" Kevin stood up with Tammy by him. Valerie crushed up her cigarette and waved the smoke out of her face. Loren was poking through the Eighties music CDs of his youth.

"I got it…" Hyde followed behind them as Angie unlocked the door to let everyone out. Kevin kissed Tammy, his future wife, and stepped back to lend an extra ounce of support to his brother's old friend. He turned round one last time behind Loren as Angie held the door open to the shop.

"Sorry, I couldn't make Casey's funeral, dude." Hyde spoke first to him. Casey had been Kevin and Michael's older brother. The egomaniac and womanizer had lost his life against a tractor-trailer while drinking and driving. His date had survived with several stitches and sutures to restore her face. "I heard the moron was pulled from the car with the beer bottle melted around his hand!"

"In many ways…" Kevin rolled his eyes about his brother. "He was sometimes just as stupid as Michael." He and Hyde shared a brotherly hug. Twenty years ago, Hyde would not have allowed such a thing to happen to him, but he had matured and changed in many ways. Valerie slipped him a peck to the cheek as she slipped out past him. Behind them, Hyde relocked the door and spun round to the empty music shop. The walls were filled with the rock stars of his past and today. Tastes had changed. Madonna had made female singers bigger than the male singers. Hyde's heroes like Ted Nugent, or as Fez would call him, "Tad" Nugent, were all but forgotten by the kids of today. He couldn't believe Elvis was still as famous today as he was then, but he wished he could take Kurt Cobain back to show Eric. He also wished he could have seen Jackie during the Cyndi Lauper years when the girls were colorizing their hair and wearing their underwear on the outside. Another deep regretful sigh, he looked at the photo of himself and the guys together behind the register. The Seventies were a better simpler time. He wished he could go back to them. His hand reached to take the broom to sweep the floor, starting from the backroom and bringing himself out to sweep the rest of the place. When he turned into the storage room, he looked up to the dull gray figure in back; it's head twitching and jerking uncontrollably then snapping to face him. The ghost of Dr. Richard Vannacutt locked eyes on Hyde hostile over letting him escape him, snapping up a scalpel from the air.

"Crap-and-a…" Hyde cursed, threw himself backward and stumbled into his own feet. The metal shelf jostled and shook when he hit it; a few cassettes hitting the floor. Halfway in and out the room, Hyde found himself on his back on the floor, the broom by his side. He lurched it up as a weapon, but the back of the storeroom was empty but for the life-size cardboard cutout of Christina Aguilera. The lights had also snapped off too. Surrounded by shadows, the darkness of dusk permeating the shop, he narrowed his eyes trying to look around him. The place was quiet. It was foreboding. Even for a location he had set up himself, this place with all the music posters and singers staring at him was starting to get into his head. His hand reached to the floor to brace him, he started lifting himself up off the floor to his feet. He wielded the broom as a weapon. Out the corner of his eye, something raced by before he could see it. He spun round to see it, his left hand reaching to the light switch. The overhead lights briefly came alight and snapped off again as if he'd blown a fuse.

"You've got to be kidding me!!!" Hyde flicked the switch over and over. Nothing… He turned toward the door to get out instead of dealing with this. He turned round once, looking around him, and spun round to the door. His hand reaching for his keys in his front right pocket, ready to race back to his place with the Formans, he held them aloft to the face of a person in his way.

"Hey, buddy…" The voice of Eric Forman strained forward from the shadows. Hyde froze where he was, his eyes widened in fear. It was Eric's shadow, his shape, his profile in the light coming through the door. He was almost physical, but not quite. Trapped between the living and the dad, Forman spoke just above a whisper, his voice stifled from beyond the grave.

"Eric???" Hyde recognized him.

"You got to ask yourself, Hyde." Eric held his head down as if he'd been punished by something. "Why were we there? We were there for a reason. Five for five…" He riddled. "The sixth one had to survive. Our arrival there was not by chance. We were there for a reason."

"Eric…" Hyde choked on his words. "I'm sorry I left you behind, man!" A tear fell from his eye.

"Not your fault!!!" Eric choked. "You have to go back!"

"I can't go back to that place!" Hyde screamed at the apparition. "You can't make me!!"

"You have to!!!" Eric coughed and choked. "Watch out for…" Something cracked loudly in the room and Hyde was distracted. It sounded as if something had shattered the glass case at the cash register, but when he looked back, there was nothing at the cash register that could have made that noise, the lights were on and Eric was gone, fleeing Hyde and leaving him pining for answers.

"What? What?" Hyde was shaking his head. "Don't make me go back! Not that place! Not that place again!" He dropped to his knees with the broom lengthwise before him about to lose it. "Why, Eric? Why?!! Why that place again???!!!" He flung the broom away from him out of sheer anger, but underneath that emotion was a deeper one. He was afraid of what might still be in the deserted former Vannacutt Sanitarium.


	3. Chapter 3

3

When Hyde told his father he wanted to revisit the sanitarium out in California again, his first answer was a quick but brief: "Why?" The former high school reject, however, then went into a frank but brief description of his experiences and visions and his compulsion to go back and "lay those ghosts to rest," but William Barnett believed he meant euphemistically, not literally. He was all out for Steven to get his past out of the way and move on. He checked with his lawyers to lay the groundwork for the visit and assigned Steven the use of his private jet. Kevin would go with him and then Loren offered to go. Before he knew it, even Tammy and Valerie would be going. Valerie just wanted to see her mother and older sister, Tina, again in Malibu. Tina had departed Point Place years ago for college and had never gone back. While Donna stayed behind, the younger sister had followed her mother after their parent's divorce to California. Donna had stayed behind on account of her love with Eric… not that they ended up as they had seen it. Valerie at least wondered if they were together in their final moments. Tammy was just along for the ride, taking a few of her vacation days from the Point Place Police Department. A limo took the five from Daugherty Airfield in Long Beach to their hotel, and then for a trip for supplies, such as flashlights and overnight supplies. Renting an SUV, their insane trip then left the comfort of the local Tipton Hotel for the deserted sanitarium overlooking the Pacific Palisades highway. Watson Pritchett, the squirrelly, nervous and owl-like owner of the place, met them at the gate.

"Oh, you again…" He recognized Hyde and then his friends. "And I see you brought some more people to feed to the place."

"Not if I can help it…" Hyde smarted off as he entered the courtyard beyond the trees around the portico. The sun was dipping on the horizon and the shadows were forming. Kevin Kelso stood with his arm around Tammy's waist and arched his head up and up and further up. This place was huge! The main structure itself was a two story round structure with a five story high hind structure, reaching up over a cliff side already seventy-five feet high. Two additional wings reached out left and right from the circular main building with balconies, parapets and stairways around the front of the highly elaborate structure surrounded by old gardens, neglected paths and wildly growing bushes. The place itself was a brilliant white though streaked by the ravages of time and the elements. Several years of dried leaves rattled and blew around under foot. Loren slammed the side door of the van.

"You're going to need a bigger flashlight." He smirked as the cloud cover made the place even more foreboding. Valerie pulled her long blonde hair being blown by the wind about her head and tied it into a tight ponytail. At forty, she looked almost exactly like Donna did at eighteen, just a bit heavier since her pregnancy. She checked her cell phone to contemplate a call to the Forman's babysitting Bobby, her seven-year-old son, then decided to do it later.

"It doesn't look that scary." Tammy looked around the tree-enclosed courtyard then shielded her eyes from the sun as she cocked her head back up to the structure.

"Oh yeah…" Pritchett responded with his annoyed but nervous gaze rolling around behind his owlish glasses. "But wait till you get inside, that's when the real fun begins…" He rolled his eyes to Hyde and looked at him as if he was crazy. "Why are you back here? You know about this place? This place is ticked off!"

"So am I!" Hyde snapped. "And I'm not letting it get the upper hand again!" Hyde tramped up the steps to the entrance, crushing a few dried leaves under foot. Kevin looked toward Tammy with him and then back to Loren and Valerie. Atop the twenty-seven steps to the front entrance and before the entranceway, Hyde kicked the door open mad as hell. It slammed back and bounced off the wall behind it. He hated this place. It had taken his friends and he wanted them back! He strolled into the foyer seeing the parlor area for the first time. When he had escaped the place, he had barely looked at it in his rush out of the place. Twenty feet above was a shattered stain-glass ceiling lit up by neon lights behind it. Beyond the huge mahogany table in the center of the entrance hall and thirty feet ahead, a grand twenty-five-step staircase went up to a balcony level and the guest quarters upstairs in the main structure. To the right was an alcove with an old style Otis elevator obscured by a coffin from Price's party some time before. The floor was a checkerboard of black and white tiles, the walls painted in a dark gray. To the left was the sitting area with the seats, tables and furniture covered by white sheets. Hyde wandered forward as far as the second set of support beams. His friends dispersed behind him.

"This place isn't like what you described." Kevin responded.

"I described the basement." Hyde did not want to be here. "I barely saw this part." The air was stagnant from being closed up. Particles of dust lit up from the light through the windows. Valerie halfway expected to see Donna's ghost in a long white gown coming down the stairway for her. So far, this was not what she expected. Nervously loitering outside, Pritchett mulled around beyond the front door on the veranda watching Hyde and this bunch of crazy adventurers..

"Why doesn't he come in?" Valerie asked Hyde.

"Because he knows about this place…" Hyde rolled his eyes and came around the table to the entrance. His path took him back toward the entryway.

"Are you sure you want to do this?!" Pritchett chucked the keys to him from outside.

"No!!" Hyde caught the keys out of the air.

"The lock-down has been disabled, you know."

"Good to know!" Hyde watched as Pritchett rolled his eyes in disbelief and left them behind, hurriedly racing down the exterior stairs to his white 1980 Volkswagen parked down below. He hated this place too. He couldn't sell it as a hospital, no one wanted it because of the ghosts and the local historical society wouldn't let him destroy it because of the 1931 murders. The only way he paid the taxes on it was by renting the place to the movie studios as an exterior film site. Inside the place, Hyde mulled around a bit trying to think of his next course of action. Still wondering why he was doing this, he strolled past Kevin, took a flashlight from him and gestured to his band of impromptu adventurers. "This way…" He led them back along the same way he had taken on his way out months earlier. A side door off the front hall was headed under the staircase and the second floor balcony past bedrooms, empty rooms and other chambers. At the end was another hall running left and right, and to the left of the shattered window at the end was the door to the basement immediately to the side. The rest of the corridor ran the width of the back end of the hospital and around the corner to the stairs to the second floor. Hyde stopped where he was before the basement door

"Are you okay?" Kevin placed his hand on his shoulder.

"I can still see them…" Hyde had a vision of the past in his head. "I still see Eric as he looked when I lost him…"

"Why are you doing this, Hyde?" Loren gave flashlights to Tammy and Valerie.

"Because I have to…" Hyde hit the switch of his flashlight and poked the beam ahead of him as he descended down into the basement. Kevin and Tammy exchanged looks and came next followed by Valerie then Loren. The first flight of steps went down fifteen feet then turned right again another fifteen. Another flight took them underground into the stomach of the place at the sub-basement level twelve feet under the first floor and extending under the courtyard. It was then that Kevin realized that Hyde had really under described this underworld. It was almost completely black except for flickering lights and illumination from other lights ahead of them. Shapes and shadows of boxes, crates, arches and walls created the outlines of the place stuck in constant night and hidden from the real world. No wonder people vanished down here. Most of it was solid black with hues of dark blue, pale yellow and dull gray. Valerie noticed the cadaver statues flanking the bottom steps first. They were just as Hyde had described: grotesque cadaverous creations of a vivified man upon a skinless horse, a separate full figure of a man without skin and his entrails exposed and then the similar preserved specimen of a human infant. At first, she thought it had horns, but the skin on its scalp had been peeled backward to expose the cranium and left sticking up, forming what looked like at first glance horns.

"Okay, that's it…" She turned round. "I'm waiting in the van!"

"Valerie…" Loren turned to her.

"All right!!!" Hyde yelled through to the same round chamber where he and his friends had been dumped on arrival. "I'm back!! Try and get me now!!!" His voice echoed through the place back at him, bouncing and crossing and reverberating through the five miles of tunnels in the place back at him. If anything was here, it surely heard him. Tammy had brought her police revolver from Point Place. Kevin heard her checking it for bullets.

"Something moves…" She replied. "I'm shooting it!" She peered through her gun sight with one eye and panned round through the place.

"Hyde, what did you plan on doing next?" Kevin looked at the girl he was about to marry then spoke out loud.

"Look…" Loren pulled a notebook from his pack. "Tammy got this from her cousin; it's his research about the place. Now, according to records, Dr. Richard Benjamin Vannacutt built this place in 1930 and used it to hold experiments on the mental patients here. Since their revolt against him and the staff in 1931, there's been a series of alleged disappearances here. The first was a restoration crew in 1942 when five guys vanished in these tunnels, the consequences of that resulted in several contractors refusing to work on the place. There was then a paranormal investigation in 1957 and then another alleged investigation in 1964 but nothing has ever really revealed about them."

"According to a contact I talked to from Los Angeles," Tammy turned round as Valerie gazed down a side tunnel past the preserved infant. "There have never been any real deaths here, just several disappearances and a lot of ghost stories. He suggested I talk to Los Angeles Paranormal about those stories."

"Okay guys, ground rules here…" Hyde took charge. "First up, don't get separated! Under no rules go anywhere by yourself. That's how it picks you off!"

"How what picks you off?" Tammy asked.

"You don't want to know!" Hyde told her. "Another thing, no touching, no looking, no exploring, no nothing! I don't care how neat something looks, don't go near it!!!"

"What's this?" Loren found a stray desk blotter resting near the wall at an angle.

"Oh man…." Hyde rolled his eyes and looked back. He recognized it. "That's the layout of the basement Eric was sketching to help us find our way." He took it back; a chill resonating through him to be holding it again. For him, it was as if he had never left. He held the crude floor plan under the one glowing light in the chamber leaving a huge circle on the floor five feet wide in radius. "Now look, we are standing in the area where the guys and I first arrived here. This is also the same place I lost Eric." He sighed a bit to be thinking about that. "The morgue is where we misplaced Donna, this cross tunnel is where Kelso vanished and somewhere over here…" His finger glided over a rough sketch of a chamber. "…Is where Kelso lost Jackie and Fez."

Valerie just hung back from them a minute. She could still see the others, but she was not wandering away from them. A gesture of movement caught her attention and she looked up and down the darkened hall over her shoulder to a cobweb-covered gurney in an open operation room. Straining her eyes, she lifted her flashlight to the ceiling just as someone emerged from the deserted room and quickly out of the way to keep from being seen. Bathed in darkness, Jackie's glistening blue eyes lit up excitedly to meet her guests. She was still just as young and beautiful as she'd always been. Valerie jumped back in shock; her eyes widened, her jaw dropped, her breath racing, her heart pumping faster… Her hysterical words rushed and overlapping as she spun round in shocked surprise and struggled to explain what she saw.

"Hyde, I saw… I saw…" She was hysterical. She tried to say it. "I saw… I saw…"

"What'd you see?!" He took her close to calm her.

"Jackie!!!" Valerie screamed. "I saw Jackie!!!" Hyde pulled her behind him and aimed his beam of light down the hallway. There was nothing down there but darkness, old spider webs and deserted hospital equipment. Kevin and Loren stood by his side ready to fight back. Before this day, Hyde's best friends were his allies, now they were the enemy.

"And now the real terror begins…." Hyde stared dementedly into the darkness as if he was the host of a horror TV-series.


	4. Chapter 4

4

"Yeah… here it is…" Hyde was leading the way. "The morgue." He followed Eric's old sketch of the basement layout. The sketch was amateurish, distorted and not to scale, but it was their best way to maneuver through the complex underground tunnels stretching out in every direction. Whoever had laid out these tunnels was not a great engineer. The layout was eccentric and eclectic with no real sense of direction or purpose. Whole wards interlocked or were connected by tunnels. Blocked-off tunnels had to be reached by going around rooms and through adjacent tunnels. Rooms blocked other rooms. Chambers were reached by cutting though derelict operating rooms. To get from the main chamber to the morgue, Hyde had to take a side-tunnel toward a smaller hall and down another tunnel. He came upon the morgue within ten to twelve minutes, but one simple tunnel might have just made it five minutes. Loren was taping their experience. Kevin was there to support Hyde. Tammy and Valerie just wanted to come along.

"What are we supposed to be looking for?" Kevin asked. The morgue was about fifteen feet deep and twenty feet wide; there was a door to the left to another room and a wall to the right into some sort of utility room. There were two autopsy tables and a menagerie of forgotten derelict medical gear, supplies, furniture and hospital debris left over from the 1930s. All this space was just going to waste. The junk filling it ready for a landfill.

"I don't know…" Hyde opened one vault to see if there was a body in it then checked another one. Nothing. About the only things left behind was the old equipment, gurneys, wheelchairs, cabinets of dried serums and the furniture. If it was all cleared out, every rusted bed, every rotted desk, every dilapidated fixture and then restored, just possibly… just possibly the place could pass as a resort for people without enough stress in their lives who liked underground basement labyrinths, but then the ghosts might still have something to say about that. "Eric wanted me back here for a reason, but for what! I mean, am I supposed to find something?"

"Maybe…" Loren was still carrying his pack. "You know, in some cultures, it's believed that a spirit never finds rest unless its earthly remains are buried on hallowed ground. Maybe, we should find their bodies."

"Oh gross…" Valerie was trying her best to support Steven, but it was getting harder and harder. Tammy set her flashlight down on one of the tables to check the sink. When she turned it on, it coughed, vibrated and suddenly started vomiting rust-filled water… the longer it ran, it finally came clear, but she still wouldn't wash with it.

"We don't know that for sure." Hyde looked toward her then walked between the pathology tables. He suddenly stopped, looked around frustratedly and lifted his head to the room. "Eric! Eric, I'm here!! What do you want me to do?!!!" His voice echoed out from the room, bouncing off walls, resonating through chambers and unsettling the dust and foundation. As the noise reverberated back, it took another sound in the form of a gasping sigh. Something in the hallway corridor behind Valerie uttered a loud plaintive reaction back to them. It was as if the place itself was waking up for them.

"Hyde, I apologize for saying I didn't believe in ghosts." She moved up close to him. "Let's just go."

"I can't…" He responded.

"Wait…" Loren heard something and cocked his head to the hall. There was something out there. He heard a distant creaking noise. It wasn't exactly a creaking; it was an intermittent squeaking noise as if from something rolling through the place. "What's that?"

"It sounds like the door to the underworld needs to be oiled." Tammy improvised with a smirking grin.

"Someone's pushing a wheelchair somewhere out there…" Kevin left the room first with Hyde then Tammy, Valerie and Loren heading the way. Tammy noticed Loren flicking on his flashlight and then thought of hers. She had left it in the room on the table where the old autopsies had been done. She stopped, hesitated and headed back to get her light; Hyde and the others quickly leaving her behind unless she hastened her step. She strided back into the room, noticed her flashlight resting on its end as she had left it and turned around quite alone to catch up with her friends. When she turned around, the door slammed shut against her. Not scared in the least, she stopped a second and wondered about it. Why would it do that? She rattled the doorknob trying to open it, but it seemed locked. She tried to unlock it, but it just didn't want to work for her. The hub for the lock just spun round and round in her fingers unable to trigger the tumblers. She reached up to pound on the door hard with the palm of her right hand.

"Hey guys…" She called out loudly between poundings. "Can you come let me out of here?!" She stroked her red hair behind her ear. "The door locked on me and I can't get out!" As she pounded, the light in the room flickered and threatened to go out. Worried her pounding was causing a short in the system, Tammy stopped her pounding of the door, but the light flicked a bit more. It never went out, and she was glad about that, but that did not explain her growing apprehension. A chill went up her spine and the hairs on her neck stood on end. She had the same sensation she had when she was being watched. Her growing fears told her not to turn around, but she turned her eyes over to her left shoulder and turned round to the larger part of the room. She became aware of the appearance of Jackie Burkhart behind her, eternally seventeen, garbed in a clean white nurse's uniform with a body and figure that was almost superhuman. Her hair was almost completely black, her white alabaster skin perfect and unblemished. She sat upon the autopsy table with her legs crossed before her, her left leg underneath swinging back and forth.

"Someone's in deep trouble here…" She was fascinated by her fingernails for a second, then fussed with her long jet black tresses before smoothing her white uniform out over her thirty-eight DD chest. Her gaze looked over to Tammy with her rich blue azure eyes. "Hi, Tammy…" Jackie bounced up off the autopsy table, her paranormally enhanced bust size bouncing on her chest as she hit the floor. "Remember me? We had biology together."

"Jackie!" Tammy recalled her police revolver and pulled it on her. She backed away from her with the gun on her.

"Oh my god, you became a cop like your dad!!!" Jackie was acting as if was just an innocent reunion. "I never would have guessed!"

"Okay, Jackie…" Tammy blew her frazzled red hair out of her face. She held her gun at arm length on the petite possessed princess. "What's going on here? Why aren't you dead?"

"Tammy, would you really shoot me?" Jackie was coming toward her. She was backing Tammy toward the adjacent room. "Let's get rid of that!" She twitched her head to the left and the gun was violently ripped from the redhead's hands. The fiery female officer watched her gun flying away and vanishing somewhere in the room. Without that mode of protection, Tammy spun around ready to resort to her unarmed combat. Jackie's eyes turned completely black as her old friend grabbed her by the hand and flipped her over to her back on the floor. It was the same technique Tammy had used on an obstinate drunk by the side of the freeway, and that guy was much taller and heavier. Bouncing up from the floor unfazed, the possessed diva grabbed her old schoolmate up by the neck like a small child and lifted her up off the floor with her crimson red lips pulled back into a snarl of several pointed teeth. Pinned to the wall between a broken scale and a ruined curtain, the red-haired law officer was punching and kicking the smaller brunette controlling her. Holding her old friend by the throat, grabbing her other arm in her left, Jackie reacted unaffected from the blows coming at her from Tammy's other hand. She came closer and closer, pressing her lips against Tammy's lips and exhaling her essence into them. Tammy reacted with alarm, screaming into Jackie's mouth at the same time as cold darkness filled her soul and started taking over. Gradually, she wasn't fighting back… but giving into the darkness and liking it.


	5. Chapter 5

5

Away from the morgue and down a hall of deserted recuperation rooms, Hyde had noticed the wheelchair that they had heard in a large chamber at the center of several corridors. It looked as if it had been rolling by itself a few feet, but the second they had found it, it was no longer rolling. What made them wonder was… what had sent it on this course? Had someone down here pushed it then left the area? Was there a breeze that had sent it along its way? Kevin rolled it back and forth to prove a breeze could have pushed it, but wherever that breeze was now was another question. His light bouncing all over it, he checked to see if he could feel the air moving.

"I know this is what was making the noise, but…" Loren looked up to Hyde. "Whatever was pushing it isn't here now."

"Yeah, but that's how it starts…" Hyde passed Eric's old floor plan to Kevin to hold. "First we get the little noises, the distant whispers and then we start seeing shadows and images of people who don't exist and it all turns into a giant churning cloud of black smoke with Jackie a hundred feet tall in the center of it."

"A hundred feet tall?" Valerie scoffed, turned her head toward the light from another hallway and then back toward Hyde. "Steven, are you sure you guys weren't smoking anything that night?"

"I haven't smoked anything since before that night!!!" Hyde couldn't believe it all kept coming back to whether or not he was stoned the night he lost his friends here. "Can you get that into your head? No comprendo?"

"Hyde, Hyde, calm down…" Kevin calmed him down. "We believe you. We believe you. Look, we're all here trying to help you try to recall what happened that night, but…." He started looking around the dark corridor of shadows, old medical gear and equipment and feelings of dread. Someone was missing. Where was his future wife? "Where's Tammy?"

They all started turning round and looking around them. Loren ran back the way they came and looked back toward the morgue. Kevin called out to her. Valerie stood watching as Hyde started running in and out of the rooms near them looking for the scarlet-haired police officer. She was nowhere in sight. She'd been right behind them! Hyde pulled his hand tiredly distraught through his hair. This was a bad idea from the start. Why the heck was he here? What was he supposed to do here? He didn't even want to come back and now it was happening again! Loren called for Tammy down the hall, and Kevin screamed down the other direction. Something made Hyde suddenly look up. A door moved ajar in the shadows, a difference in the shadows appeared and he thought it resembled a ghostly white nurse with very dark hair. Memories of Jackie Burkhart from his last time here started coming back to him. With Loren, Valerie and Kevin watching this image with him, he watched as this shadowy presence took on more color, more of a shape and a different composure. As she came closer, Tammy emerged from the darkened room gliding toward them with a new look, a new personality, a new bearing and a new direction.

"What's the matter?" Her eyes locked on Hyde as she spoke. "A girl can't go the bathroom without any privacy."

"You scared the hell out of me!" Kevin pulled her close to him. He kissed her on the lips. "Don't wander away like that ever again."

"Okay," She looked to her fiancé then back to Hyde. "I won't wander away like that again." Hyde looked upon her as if he didn't trust her. Sure she was back and unharmed, but something bothered him about that. Why were they distracted to leave the morgue? Why did nothing happen to her while she was gone while everyone else before him had vanished? She eyed him back distrustful. It was almost as if she had her own agenda now.

"Did anything happen to you in there?" He asked her.

"Why do you ask that?"

"What are you answering my question with a question?"

"Am I doing that?"

"Hyde, stop it…" Kevin came between them. "Now…" He reared up the sketched layout. "Aren't we somewhere near where Kelso vanished?"

"Yeah…" Hyde turned to head to their only constant light on in the area. The other light fixtures just flickered or dimmed on and off, but then there were so many loose lights and hanging fuse books that it was more than obvious that the place was an electrical disaster waiting to happen here. Tammy smirked secretly, rolled her eyes to Loren a bit with his camera and then moved over to walk along with Valerie. As they stepped from the larger hall to the smaller corridor, they moved past doors closed, open or ajar and another hall crossing their path. She looked down into the darkness at the far end as they passed through the patients' recuperation area.

"Valerie… Valerie…" Tammy was tugging her away from the guys. "Did you see that?"

"See what?"

"I thought I saw something." She was grinning oddly, her eyes a bit wild and unnatural. "Let's go check it out!"

"Hyde said don't wander off." Valerie didn't like that idea.

"What does he know?!" Tammy insanely looked over her. "He doesn't know what he's looking for! I think we should go exploring." Her eyes rounded dementedly.

"Here?!" Valerie didn't like that idea. "What's gotten into you?"

"What… you ask?" Tammy placed her hand to her chest trying to be harmless. Valerie just scoffed at her as their group came up into another chamber. It looked rather like the main hall, round with halls and two operating rooms across from each other. Despite the mind-numbing silence, there was a sound of dripping water piercing the quiet along with their scuffling footsteps. Kevin and Hyde studied Eric's old sketch to make sense of it and determine some of his notes. He had marked the area with the morgue and the room with the saturation chamber as well as seven of the fifteen shock therapy rooms. Everything else was a recovery room, office, storeroom or operating room with the occasional isolation room or padded chamber. Two of the four lights hanging in a square over their heads gave just a bare minimum of illumination for them to tell what Eric had left them. Hyde wanted to head back the way through the lab into the main hall. Kevin wondered about that way; it wasn't part of the sketch.

"Kevin, honey…" Tammy was getting intimate with her fiancé by holding on to his belt. "Let's find a place to…" She licked his face toward his ear and whispered in it.

"Here?!" Kevin was so not like his brother Michael Kelso. "Are you nuts? I'm not even peeing against the wall!!" He handed her the desk blotter with the layout on it. She took it with an evil glint to her eyes, a light snarl to the corner of her lips. In her hands, it started drying up. Loren noticed smoke from her hands as their only way out of this place started turning to ash. It started drying out, scorching and charring, smoking like a sheet of wood burning up just before falling apart into several million ashes. Hyde tried to grab it back, but it was gone. That was their only layout of this place, and it had burned up without a spark of flame in Tammy's hands..

"Tammy…" Hyde looked at her backing away from him. "What did you do?!!"

"You guys are so screwed, right now…" She backed up into the recovery room behind her. In the darkness, her face turned a pallor of ghastly white, her bright red hair turned darker and even more darker until it was completely black and part of the darkness. The shape of her face changed to resemble someone else. It became rounder, her eyes much more wilder, her bosom filling out against her dark green sweater. Standing in the darkness of the room, Jackie realized she liked this new body. She was a bit taller than before and even more stunning than before. Her face grinned demonically.

"You should have listened to Eric." Jackie's and Tammy's voices sounded over each other. "He tried to tell you to watch out for me." She giggled that horrible underworldly laugh and plunged backward into the darkness, vanishing completely. Kevin charged the room to try and take Tammy from her, but his arms reached out to nothing. He smacked his foot into the rusted steel bed frame in the room out of anger and screamed out in pain. With Loren struggling to get Jackie on tape, and Valerie aback in fear, Hyde felt his anger growing. He wanted to bounce that possessed witch off the walls. Kevin kicked the wall out of grief from losing his fiancée. The place was for real, and it was all Hyde's fault! He turned round and punched him out. Hyde dropped like a stone.

"This is all your fault!!!" He screamed upset. "Your fault!!!"

Hyde screamed at him and jumped up pushing Kevin through a door and knocking him to the floor, smacking him over and over. Loren dropped his pack to stop them. Valerie started crying in the corner.

"Guys!!! Guys!!!" Loren tried coming between them, grabbing Hyde, tossing him to the wall and pushing against Kevin from striking him again. Breathing heavily, wiping his bloodied lip, he glared angrily at Kevin. The young brother of Michael Kelso winced and pined crying for his true love. "Look!!!" Loren gasped again. "We wanted to come here. Hyde warned us, but we came anyway… We underestimated this place, but Hyde didn't!" He recaught his breath. "Kevin, I'm sorry!" Hyde rubbed his bloody lip. He knew he could take Kevin, bit this was not the place to prove it.

"Oh god!!!" Kevin wailed realizing what was happening as Valerie tried to give him her support.

"I should never have come back here…." Hyde groaned upset and angry. "Only this time… I don't think it is just Vannacutt we should be worried about anymore." He realized just how demented that irritating former heiress had become.


	6. Chapter 6

6

"Where are we?" Kevin asked. Hyde was trying to recall the layout from memory based on the number of corridors, cross tunnels and chambers, but he was not doing well getting them out of this place. He thought he knew where he was five times and near the main chamber seven times. Whoever built this place had been a madman. Halls turned at weird angles across other halls. Corridors ended at dead ends. Offices turned out to be closets. Rooms separated from other rooms. It had been designed as a maze for psychiatric patients to be snapped to normalcy, but it just made them even more insane. Hyde rediscovered where someone had tried to close up one room and the old saturation chamber.

"I remember this." He spoke up. "This where I last saw Kelso." Hyde left one hall from a much wider and better supported cross-tunnel. Standing by Valerie, he showed Kevin and Loren. Between them, another person leaned in to see where they were looking.

"Yup, this is where Donna got me alright." Michael Kelso suddenly had joined them to look at his baby brother. "Dude, you've gotten old!!!"

"Michael!" Kevin wanted to hug him, but he didn't. Michael looked almost alive. His skin pale white, his hair almost completely black like an old faded black and white photo and his clothes ruined and falling apart, he turned to Valerie.

"Wow, Donna's little sister really filled out!"

"Kelso!" Hyde walked around him. The idiot seemed to have become bolder with his death after accepting it. He was luminous in places, intangible in others as if his form was still trying to perfect a single state. They two of them eyed each other through the fabric of the real world and the realm of the dead.

"You grew the beard back?" Kelso noticed then forced himself to think back. "Look, forget about me! You guys have got to get out of here. Jackie has completely lost it. You can't stop her!"

"Why?!!!" Kevin reached to his brother. "What happened?!!!"

"You can't stop her!" Michael screamed to get them to leave the place. "You'll just make it worse! You…" He became distracted by something else and became completely immaterial until he was gone altogether. Hyde, Valerie and Kevin looked behind them to the operating room. There was nothing there that they could see, but that didn't mean there wasn't anything there.

"Wait! Wait!!" Hyde grabbed and reached to the air Kelso had been standing. "Kelso! How do we get out?! Which way??!" He looked around trying to find him again. There was not a sign of him. He was just here one minute and gone the next. "Just like a Kelso!!!"

"Hey!!!" Kevin took offense. Not all of them were complete idiots!

"Sorry, dude…" Hyde thought about it. "I guess I'm slipping back there…"

"Guys…" Valerie looked up. Loren turned round next. Some fifty to sixty feet from them, beyond a lot of darkness a light had snapped on in a far hall. Standing in it, Eric's spirit was waving him through to them. He looked solid, garbed in a white shirt and pale blue jeans with vague shadows obscuring his feet. He stoically and expressionlessly gestured to them with short hand movements as if he was in a trance, unable to control himself before the light grew brighter and fazed him out of view. He vanished with the burst of intense voltage.

"Do you trust him?" Loren asked Hyde.

"I don't know." Hyde turned back the way they had come through the other archway past dirty lime green walls and instructions stenciled on the wall in German. Pushing through cobwebs and pools of water on the floor, the four survivors reached the light where Eric had been standing, surrounded by four hallways heading in every direction.

"Where to next?" Kevin asked.

"I don't know." Hyde checked to be sure everyone was with him.

"Can you say anything other than I don't know?" Loren asked.

"I don't know." Hyde turned round once looking for his lost buddy and then round again looking for another. He took a few steps toward a darkened but partially lit chamber with an empty display case, eyed a gated room to the hostile patients wing and rejoined Kevin still in his sight. Was Eric still trying to help him, or was he working with Jackie? He did try to warn him, so he was hoping Eric had yet to be overcome by his dark side. Even from the afterlife, it seemed that Eric was still coming through for him.

"Wait a second…" Hyde suddenly recalled something. "Back in Point Place, Eric said five for five…" He turned to Loren. "In your research, you said that several groups of people have vanished here, right?"

"Yeah…" The Native American CPA recalled his research. "Yeah, in 1942, 1957, 1964 and you guys in 1978."

"Hyde, what's up?" Kevin reacted.

"It's always been five people no matter how many was here!" Hyde was wildly rationalizing. "What if we had been dumped here in 1978 as sacrifice to free five previous sprits who had been sacrificed for five previous spirits and five previous before them… like… some revolving door of characters?" He looked round the hall once and back to Valerie. "That's why we were dumped here! No matter what, there has to be a certain number of ghosts here and if a certain number are freed, they have to be replaced. That's why Eric said five for five. He wanted me to bring you guys to free him, Donna, Kelso, Jackie and Fez."

"I can't believe Eric would trick you like that!" Loren made a face of disbelief.

"Maybe it wasn't really Eric." Valerie was starting to believe this stuff.

"If it wasn't Eric, why would he then try to warn me?" Hyde wanted to know.

"What about the black smoke?" Kevin shone his light up and around to get a bearing of the place. "Where does it figure in?"

"In Cherokee tradition…" Loren spoke as the drum beats and chants of his ancestors filled his senses. "The otkon is the darkness generated by all mortal man. It is the form taken by hate, fear and evil. When Dr. Vannacutt killed and violated his patients, he poured a lot of bad energy into this place. He created his own otkon… a power source that he wields from the spirit world. It's this force that terrifies us… and which holds these poor spirits here... and which Jackie now controls."

"Is there a way to destroy it?" Hyde looked at him partially covered in shadow.

"Well, you could call upon a god like Manabozho…" Loren mentioned. "He's the eternal enemy of the Great Trickster Coyote, but he doesn't usually reply to mortals. You'd be better off getting either Odin or Zeus."

"Maybe they're listed in the yellow pages…" Valerie mumbled.

"They're gods…" Loren's accent sounded.

"Oh…" The blonde murmured a bit. "I guess that makes it more difficult." She continued out of jest then realized she was perpetuating a blonde stereotype she herself hated. A stray light suddenly went on behind her in another hall down from them. Hoping it wasn't just another stray short circuit in this place of sparking and weakening light bulbs, Hyde tapped Kevin at the shoulder and led the way toward it. Loren stopped a second to adjust his pack. He was tired of carrying it over his right shoulder and swung it over to his left shoulder for a while. That done, he lifted his head and realized he was in the dark. The light had gone out and he could not see anyone. Alone, he realized he was about to rejoin Tammy and the others. He rushed to catch up with the gang who had left him behind without knowing how close he was to them.

"Guys, wait up!!" He rushed around the corner, down a length of hall trying to catch up to them. Looking through doors and other halls, he exited under an arch into a large chamber with a vaulted ceiling. There was a stray wheelchair or two, a set of stacked gurneys, an old medical cabinet, an empty display case and a set of double doors across from him into another surgery room. Where was everyone?

"Hyde!!!" He screamed out at the top of his lungs. His voice started echoing back as someone drifted out across from him. Garbed in a long white patient's gown, the ghost of Donna Pinciotti appeared. Her skin as white as a tombstone, her hair a deep blood red, she lightly smiled to Loren as she exited another hall across from him and entered another archway. Fumbling with his pack, Loren rushed to catch her on digital tape and hurried after her. She seemed to be gliding toward him on wires. Unearthly and beautiful in a supernatural sort of way, she moved along the hall toward a dead end with doors around her Nowhere else to go, she looked back to Loren, grinned enigmatically and passed through the door before her.

"Whoa…" Loren paused and checked the footage he had caught. In the footage, she was even more unearthly, a pale luminous apparition surrounded by mist and pale light. He checked it ready to tape again and reached to enter the room after her. The door stuck a bit at first, but he whacked against it hard then harder, finally pushing it open to a crack. The space behind the door was completely black; there was no light at all. He moved to step forward and found empty space… that section of the stairwell having burned up and away several years before. He tried to catch himself from falling, grabbing for the doorframe, but his momentum was set. His head fell forward fast and he plummeted the twelve feet into the sub-basement like a rock. The last noise he made was a dull groan; the last thing he saw was Donna standing in the doorway above him. She beamed toward him silently, seemingly admiring her handiwork, then leapt through it after him with her fingers flailed and her face contorted into a hideous scowl.


	7. Chapter 7

7

"Loren!!!" Hyde screamed down toward sheer darkness. "Loren!!!!"

"Loren!!!" Kevin called down the other way to the sight of a sheer wall at the far end illuminated by a flickering light threatening to go out. "And then there was three…" He paused waiting to recatch his breath. They had found one of the shock therapy rooms when they looked behind them and realized their amateur paranormal researcher was missing. Valerie was close to losing it. Her hands shaking, her body nervously pacing back and forth wondering who was going to vanish next. She should never have come here… she should never have come… He was hysterically crying and pacing.

"Valerie, calm down!" Kevin looked at her.

"Calm down?! Calm down?!!" She screamed at him. "We're dead! Do you hear me? Dead!!! We're all going to get killed here because your idiot friends are trying to kill us!!!" She turned around upset to wander around the desk once more. "I shouldn't have come. I shouldn't have come." She mumbled to herself as she circled the desk.

"Look…" Hyde sighed and made his choice. "I want you guys to lock yourselves in here, I'm going out to look for Loren." He rubbed the back of his head, overwrought that with the decision to return to this place and to drag them along as further sacrifices to that demonic petite diva he once dared call a friend. The more victims Jackie obtained, the more powerful she was getting and the more dangerous she became, possibly enough to usurp Vannacutt's ghost in his control of the place. "If I'm not back in twenty, get yourselves out and don't look back." He gave into his fate.

"No, Hyde, don't…" Kevin tried to talk him out of it. "We're in this together."

"No, listen to me…" Hyde refused his help. "I'm not scared of this place anymore. I'll be back…" He backed out of the room into the hall. "Or I won't…" He took a deep breath realizing this was the thing to do. He made one last look at Kevin and Valerie and pulled the door closed to the hall before him. He took another deep breath to muster his courage and started back the way they had come to find his best friend. Kevin stood where he was trying to think of what to do. They were alone in a small room by themselves. A dusty deserted desk set up for recording shock therapy sessions in the middle of the room, a humming transformer at the end and the door to the shock therapy room closed open behind them. He looked at Valerie, checked it to make sure it was empty and closed the door to it so no one could slip up behind them. Alone to themselves, they shared a breath of solace for the moment.

"You think we're getting out of here alive?" Valerie wondered.

"Yeah, of course…" Kevin sat on the edge of the desk and pulled Valerie to sit down by him. "We'll get out of here. Hyde will be with us too. Maybe even Loren…" As they shared their moment, the doorknob to the previously empty shock therapy room behind them silently tested itself.

"How can you be sure?" Valerie's breath turned to steam in the cold air around them.

"Hyde's as tough as they come." Kevin recalled the days when Hyde and his brother were close friends with Eric and spent the days hanging out in the Forman family basement. "He's survived this place once, and if we do what he says, we'll make it too." He tried to assure her. Behind them, the door pulled away from the doorframe to the therapy room a bit without a sound.

"What about Loren and Tammy?" Valerie didn't look behind her as the black smoke poured into a blanket under the door across the floor and beneath the desk they were sitting on. She continued their talk oblivious to what was behind them.

"Well," Kevin tried not to think about it. "Loren possibly just got lost taking pictures… but Tammy…" He tried not to think the worst. "I'm sure she's looking over us." A pair of completely white eyes in the doorway behind them was staring at the back of his head. The younger brother of Michael Kelso didn't look behind him. Danger was creeping closer and closer and neither her nor Valerie was aware of it. It wafted under their feet and started reaching up over the desk preparing to envelope them up with it as if it a massive germ enveloping and absorbing its prey.

"I think you're right…" Valerie had calmed a bit. "He seems to know his stuff. I bet Hyde's coming back with him right now."

"That's the way to think, girl…" Kevin jumped to his feet and turned to the door to the hall. "You could be braver than me." He pulled the door open to the hall, looked out to the left and then to the right and closed it again. He started closing it again as he turned to Valerie. "I bet Hyde's reaming Loren right now for…" He turned round grinning to Valerie only to view the empty room, barren note board on the wall and dusty clipboard on the hook. She was gone! All he did was turn away from her for a second! His head turned to the shock therapy room and he kicked its door open with vengeance. The door flying open tore down the curtain hanging from the wall behind it, but the room was empty. He lifted his hands to his head about to lose it!

"Hyde!!!" He tore from the room as a bat out of hell screaming his head off and uncertain where he was going. He slid a few feet into a wall curving to his left and caught himself, his feet carrying him forward into uncertain darkness. Flickering lights whirling past him, empty rooms getting left behind in his wake and discarded doors propped against walls nearly blocking his path, the distraught high school teacher started feeling like one of his kids. He started to dart through a cross tunnel then stopped. He'd seen someone watching him. Just barely catching the image, Kevin Kelso backed a few steps and looked back. Standing just twenty feet from him in the dark archway was the ghastly figure of Dr. Richard Vannacutt, his white surgical gown stained with the blood of innocents, his dark hair concealed under his surgical cap and his narrow mustache curled back on his scowling face. They scowled to each other; neither one willing to give up.

"I want my friends back, you monster!!!" Kevin screamed at him. "I want them back now!!!" Vannacutt didn't respond. More concerned with preserving his power here, his white apparition just slid backward into the darkness. Kevin was not letting him vanish from him. He actually sprung forward and charged the demented sadist ready to put him through grief, but the second he crossed the section of area that Vannacutt was standing, something invisible hit him and Kevin Kelso was flying sideways into empty air, bouncing off another wall and fighting to stay awake. As his vision struggled to focus, he looked up to mist filling the air, the shades of staff and patients moving past him. Spectral nurses pushing apparitions of patients in wheelchairs, wandering echoes of immaterial mental patients just as confused in the afterlife as they were on Earth, a befuddled staff member hastening toward and around his fellow shades as he tried to make his rounds… these were the shades of the past trapped in the place. They were the memories of this place once made whole, and where the smoke touched them, they shifted from immaterial shades to cadaverous rotted specters of death and back again. Shocked and scared for his life, Kevin froze at these ghastly and lost remnants of once living people. His own hands wrapped round his mouth to keep from screaming. He just prayed they didn't see him…

A wing over and three halls away, Steven Hyde stopped and recognized the mass of smoke pouring toward him. It was nothing but a wave of negative ectoplasm… capable of pulverizing and draining the living of all warmth, energy and life, leaving behind nothing but a rotten decomposing corpse. It looked like a tidal wave of water rushing through the place, blocking out light and blinding Hyde to anything behind it. Cursing under his breath, Hyde turned and ran the way he had come and then down another way when his previous option was blocked by more of that deadly smoke. His feet striking the floor hard, not looking back to see how close it was, Hyde rushed through a short hall, through a wide chamber lit by partial illumination and then darted round a corner trying to stay ahead of it. Not sure how close it was to swallowing him up; he heard it rumbling in his ears like a growling tornado whipping up the hall behind him. His breath racing, Hyde charged toward a light he saw in the distance but felt himself pulled off his feet just before reaching it. Screaming out loud, he felt himself thrown into a rotted mattress lying on the floor of one of the recovery rooms. The door slamming behind him, he hit the wall with his shoulder and the floor with his back. His aching head peered up to the ethereal faded presence looking at him.

"Fez?" He recognized it. He looked like he did in life… only trapped in shades of light blue and pale gray and bathed almost entirely of air and portions of gaseous ectoplasm and particles of dusting swirling around into shapes of the foreign exchange student's face and shoulders. Somewhere beyond the room, the black smoke roared and belched looking for Hyde.

"I can't hide you for long, Hyde…" He swirled around and over his old friend. "Jackie won't let me go, and Eric can't survive much longer. He's sorry he led you here, but…" Fez faded out and struggled to reform once more. "He thought you could free us and stop this from ever happening in the first place."

"Fez… I don't know what to do!!" Hyde's jaw dropped as he stared him down. "What happened to you, man? Where did you go?"

"You want to know where I went?" Being a ghost did nothing to affect that accent. "You want to know what Jackie did to me? Let me put it like this, all those times I wanted to do it with Jackie, well, she did it to me! She sent me deeper into her than I ever wanted to go!"

"You mean…"

"Let's just say there was no light at the end of that tunnel!!" Fez faded away and back again trying to hold on to his best friend. "Jackie won't let me go into the light! I don't want to do what she says… but she's very close to taking this place over for herself. " He reeled from the torture he was going through from this former hospital bathed in the blood of terror and torture. "Get out of this place while you can!!! When we next meet, I won't be able to stop myself…." He drifted apart one last time. Hyde reached out to grab him but felt nothing but icy cold air.

"Fez…" Hyde broke down grieving for him. He hated this place so much. He hated it with ever ounce of strength he had left. Hearing the insane silence around him, he stepped to his feet once more, reared up off the floor and groaned himself to stand erect once more. Testing the doorknob, he peeked out through the crack. The hall was empty but for swinging lights and swaying doors to other rooms. He pulled the door open even wider, stepping out and surprising another presence. He and Kevin suddenly became aware of each other. Kevin was carrying an old first kit filled with bottles of old medicine, gauze, scissors and other forgotten surgical relics of this place.

"What are you doing here?" Hyde had wanted him to stay in that room. "Where's Valerie?!"

Kevin couldn't repeat it.

"Hyde…" Kevin breathlessly gasped, his strength spent and his emotions wrought up in sorrow. "I've got a plan. I found these nitro tablets. The ghosts not controlled by Jackie or Vannacutt showed them to me. They're given to patients with heart problems. " He took another deep breath. "Now, they're old, but like the nitro in dynamite, they tend to get unstable with age…" He looked at him close to prove he was in his right mind. "I say we blow this place!"

"What about us?"

"I don't think we're getting out alive."


	8. Chapter 8

8

Valerie woke up from her deep sleep to new surroundings. Where was she? Gasping under her breath, she looked around to empty space around her. She was laying on her back inside something. Her hands reached up and around trying to figure out where she was. Claustrophobic and scared for her life, she felt she'd been sealed up inside the walls of this place. How'd she even get here? The last thing she recalled was that she was talking to Kevin and then a chilling darkness possessed her and put her to sleep. Her senses smelled the sick sweet smell of decomposing flesh around her. Barely able to move, she shifted and moved around in her casket-shaped space. Had she been buried alive? Where was she? Tears starting from her eyes, she started kicking and screaming, her mournful cries calling for help from her grave. She pounded upon her metal lid, but it rattled and shook on her blows. It wasn't weighted down by earth. It was then it dawned on her where she was. She was on a shelf in the morgue! A piercing scream screeched forward from her lungs and echoed around her.

The door at her feet suddenly opened and she realized she had been rescued. She calmed a bit, a small giddy chuckle to realize she was safe, but as her drawer was pulled open, she realized who had put her in the drawer! Her older sister's face stared down at her grinning ear to ear. She still looked as young as if she was still eighteen! Valerie felt herself lifted up and dropped onto the pathology table. Jackie and Donna were hurriedly rushing to strap her down to the table.

"Donna, it's me! Valerie!!" Valerie tried struggling to get loose. Jackie and Fez rushed around her to strap her down. "I'm your sister!!!" Donna quickly placed the gag over her sister's mouth to stop her from talking. Fez strapped down her legs, and Eric grabbed her arms to strap them down. The whole time this was happening, Donna never lost that sadistic grin. Her eyes were empty of compassion, her demeanor cold and unyielding. Realizing this was not her sister before her, but a shade of what she once was, Valerie struggled to look around her. She could barely see around her. The lights flickered and threatened to go out, but in that flash of struggling light, an extra figure had appeared. Its face was a void blank and melted ruin of distorted flesh for all of a second, but it shook violently and regained its face. Shaking off that horrifying visage, it became Dr. Vannacutt once more, the sadist responsible for the deaths in this place. Eric cowed to his presence with an excited impatient rush to operate, but Fez tightened the restraints and pulled on them even tighter. As Vannacutt chose the scalpel of his choice from the tray, Valerie's eyes widened even more in fearful shock. Around her, other apparitions began mulling in the darkened room. Among them, Michael Kelso watched out of morbid fascination at this autopsy. Tammy was even there at her feet; helping to hold her down to the table. Jackie, the most demented out of all of them, swung her leg over Valerie and sat on top of her thighs ready to guide the operation. Bound and restrained, Valerie couldn't move! Whatever was going to happen, it was going to happen!!

"Mrs. Pinciotti…" Vannacutt pulled his surgical mask up. "You've been very sick." His cold blue eyes looked down to her.

"We haven't done brain surgery in weeks!!!" Donna's apparition finally spoke even while trying to resist her demonic tendency, her sadistic empty white eyes turning to Jackie leading the surgery.

"I've a better idea!" The demonic diva held Valerie down by the shoulders, her face coming with inches of Valerie's. "Let's see if those are implants!!!!" She was right on top of her. Her eyes darting around the ghastly and inhuman shades of the dead around her, Valerie's muffled screams tried to break through her restraints. Jackie was holding her down, her sister was assisting the demonic doctor and Eric leered over the table with Fez holding Valerie's legs from moving. Tears pouring down her eyes, Valerie watched as Vannacutt placed his scalpel to her throat, ready to disembowel her from her throat to her stomach. She winced from the up-coming experience, the moment hitting her with the impact of an explosion devastating the room, turning everything to black except for the wildly swinging ceiling fixture. Where there were once several dozen huddled and overlapping apparitions of decomposing ghosts and immaterial corpses was now a darkened morgue, it's one light shaking wildly with the one working light bouncing from wall to wall. The explosion had momentarily dissipated them. Hyde and Kevin charged the room and appeared over her, hurriedly undoing Valerie's straps and restrains to free her. She was never so happy to see them!

"I told you that stuff was unstable" Kevin turned to Hyde. "I didn't watch all those episodes of MacGyver for nothing you know!!" They had blown down the door to the morgue!

"Yeah, yeah, yeah…" Hyde unbolted the strap holding the mask over Valerie's face, and she sat up crying and hugging him. Kevin had freed her feet, but out the corner of his eyes, he saw the shadows inside the body shelves of the morgue vault getting darker. Every single hatch on each shelf had been knocked off when they blew up the door to the room, and from deep inside that god-awful body vault, something darker than the room was congealing, spinning in hatred and leaking out ready to lash out at them.

"Hyde!!!" Kevin called to him.

Turning hero once again, the curly haired former vandal helped Valerie off the autopsy table and pushed her behind him and out the door with Kevin. Hyde took another plastic bottle of nitro wrapped in cloth and lit it quickly before tossing it into the morgue and turning round running. The burning cloth vanished into the swirling black smoke pouring out of the body vaults and then exploded violently. The entire ward reeled from that blast. Walls trembled and the lights flickered around them as torrents of metal supports distorted, walls cracked, parts of the ceiling came crashing down and deserted medical appliances flew outward everywhere. A busted water pipe started flooding the room too low to put out the fires starting from the short-circuiting light fixtures. Pulling Valerie behind him, Kevin raced toward the main chamber with Hyde racing to catch up with them. Racing around sharp corners and down long tunnels, Hyde suddenly stopped to light more nitro. Beyond the reeling after affects of the explosions in his ears, he heard another noise like a tidal wave bearing down on him. When he turned he saw that massive cloud of smoke racing toward him, churning and spinning angry and unforgiving with Jackie's face and body forming within it and growing larger and larger as she rushed to him. Her completely black eyes wreaked with cold vengeance. She was almost completely possessed now!

"Hyde, come on!!!" Kevin and Valerie were racing up the stairs out of the basement. "Get out of here!!!"

"Just one more!!!" Hyde stood lighting another rag. "Come get me, you evil b…" It exploded too soon this time and he was thrown backward through the air hard by the explosion, crashing into the wall behind him hard with an obscene bone-crushing blow to his back and shoulder. He heard the glass cases with the cadaver statues shatter from the reverberation and concussive forces echoing through the chambers. Jackie's massive banshee screamed from every section of ceiling that came crumbling down to the floor, gradually abating to a roar of roaring thunder. Broken lights crashed to the floor. Gurneys that had been stacked toppled over and plummeted to the tiled floor with thunderous results. Parts of the floor collapsed into the water works under the place. Thrown clear, Steven Hyde slid several feet across the floor from the blast, a thick volume of air filled with dust and debris raining over him. His back felt as it was broken, his head almost conceivably cracked open like a rotten coconut. He couldn't feel his arms or legs. Fighting against the pain, he laid where he was ready to die as the reverberations died down. He closed his eyes in pain, his body spent from pain. He allowed himself lay like that for a minute until it was completely quiet, the sound of the explosion leaving his ears like a receding storm. Fighting for a gasp of air, his hand shook a moment. He lied on that cold unkempt surface trying to keep from dozing off from his pain-wracked body. It was completely quiet now. It was almost mind numbingly quiet when he heard rustling near him. He thought it was Kevin coming back to save him. He cocked his head up to look up at him.

"Eric! Oh my god!!" Jackie Burkhart in a physical pastel form had jumped off the floor and was swatting Eric hard. They looked as if they were alive. "What are you doing?"

"What? I thought you were Donna!" He was trying to evade her swats and tiny clenched fists. Eric was in his ugly red and green Seventies t-shirt; the same one he had worn years ago when he was dumped here. Jackie was in a pink long-sleeved sweater with her powder blue skirt. Kelso was in his dark brown shirt and blue jeans jumping to Jackie's honor. None of them looked like ghosts; they looked… alive again…

"What happened?"

"He was sleeping with his head on my chest!

"Eric!!!"

"Ooooo…" Fez was sitting on the floor over near Donna jumping to her feet to defend Eric. "Fist fight…" This was all too familiar. Hyde checked his hands and feet for injuries to his face and body. His beard was gone! He was eighteen and fresh-faced again! The beard was gone, his blue golf shirt replaced by a black Ted Nugent t-shirt and there was nothing around him that showed signs of being blown up around him. Had he defeated this place? It was almost as if everything had been reset back to that night they appeared here!

"Hey…" Kelso was even alive and about to say something stupid. "Everyone knows Donna has a bigger rack than Jackie."

"What?!" The girls did not want to be reduced to a mere part of their bodies!

"Guys…" Hyde screamed interrupting Fez's next line. "We have to get out of here!!!"

"What?" Kelso looked round. "Where are we?"

"Get out of here!!!" Eighteen-year-old Steven Hyde pushed Kelso toward the other chamber and the stairs. "Go! Go! Go! Go!!!"

"Hyde," Eric stood confused. "What are you doing?!"

"No questions, Forman!!!" Hyde forced him past the grotesque statues in the unshattered display cases. Donna tried to tell him off, and Fez tried to linger to study the disturbing creations, but Hyde continued forcing, herding and pushing them up the stairs. Kelso screamed upset and unwilling to be forced out of what was certainly a most interesting place. Donna shot one look at Hyde and rolled her eyes to expect his excuse.

"Steven!!!" Jackie shook her skinny finger at him. She was mortal once more instead of the undead succubus she had become. "What's wrong with you?!"

"Especially you, you little psycho!!!" He pointed his finger back at her as her eyes rounded when he lifted her over his shoulder and struggled up the stairs with her. Briefly looking behind him, he hastened up the stairs on pure adrenaline carrying her pounding at his back, accidentally smacking her head against the wall as he turned up the second flight and then dropping her at the top landing of the ground floor. She swatted him angrily over being treated like that and rushed to rejoin Michael. Having cleared the basement, Hyde grabbed a chair and wedged it against the doorknob to keep anything from coming up after them then rushed to join his friends in the great hall. It was now clean and opulent, the ceiling restored, the floor polished and a fire burning in the fireplace lounge. They had also found the table of food that had been left that night. Eric stuffed himself with deviled eggs and shrimp. Fez attacked the cookies and cakes and Donna and Jackie appreciated the plates with finger sandwiches, stuffed mushrooms and watercress sandwiches. Kelso twisted the cap off a bottle of imported beer.

"Hey, Hyde…" Eric turned with a beer in hand. "Where'd the beer and goodies come from?" Upon seeing that table with the food, Hyde realized another ugly fact. According to Loren, no was here in this place the night of their school dance. All that food should not be here; it had been set up for Steven Price's party in 2001. That meant now all of them were in 2001 and twenty years older the second they stepped outside! It was a small price to pay to get them all out, alive and as far from this place as possible!

"Grab what you can carry and get out!" He screamed at them. They weren't moving; they just stared at him confused. Hyde tried to think of a way to get them out. "This place is about to blow up, man!!!" Kelso suddenly panicked.

"Hyde, dude, what the heck did you do?!!!" Kelso screamed quickly grabbing beers and a bottle of champagne. He thought Hyde had left a bomb in the basement. Everyone suddenly started piling food on paper plates and took a bottle of beer. Donna was out first followed by Eric, Fez trying to abscond with whole platters of food and bottles stuffed into his shirt. Jackie looked back at Michael trying to carry all those beer bottles, dropping and losing them as he rushed to catch up, cursing and swearing as one after another dropped and shattered after another. Hyde brought up the rear. All he could think of was that Steven Price was going to be ticked off at the absence of the food for his party that night. He rolled his eyes and tore out into the cold night air ready to flee back to Point Place. In the courtyard below, the SUV still remained, but it was not Michael and Jackie rushing to it. It was Kevin and Valerie. Fighting to catch up, Loren and Tammy were alive and a few feet behind them.

"I still feel her in me!!" Tammy jumped into Kevin's welcoming arms. "Kevin, get me away from this place!!" She begged for his forgiveness as he kissed her, Loren jumping into the back seat behind them unnerved by his experience and eager to be away from this place. Everything had reset all right, right back to 2001 again, but without Eric and the others. Hyde felt his beard again, he was forty-one again. His eyes looked for someone else behind him, but his feet were carrying him down the front stairway at breakneck speed. This wasn't fair! He had rescued his friends. He had got them out! He got them _all_ out! Looking back in confusion, his mouth hanging open, he glanced backward halfway expecting Eric, Donna and the guys coming to join them in the Twenty-First century with their friends and relatives, but they were not there. Maybe they had never been here. His heart sinking upon realizing how close they all nearly made it this time. Kevin and the others called to Hyde to get in the SUV.

"Sorry, guys… I tried…" He spoke to their memory then jumped into the van as Loren slammed the side door shut. The vehicle veered around in a circle, it's tires tossing up gravel and the front grill hitting weeds in its high-speed escape. Within seconds, they were tearing down the hill toward the front gate and the highway as fast as Kevin could drive.


	9. Chapter 9

9

"I was there." Hyde was slumped against the window. "They were alive… I got them out…" Everyone was relatively quiet. Valerie was glad to be out of that place and on US Highway 1 South surrounded by late evening car-poolers, gridlock and commuters. It was late evening, almost midnight and traffic was moving fairly. The lights along the road lit the road up and turned it into an orange blanket dotted by every model and color of car. The sky was a dark blue and the clouds obscured the moon. Peering into cars driving by them, Tammy nervously and delicately trembled after her horrible experience. She had felt Jackie in her and liked it. She had liked it! All that dark power at her control, and it was lurched from her in a second. She wanted it back, but… not at the expense of her soul. By her side, Loren reached to his leg. It was still bothering him from the fall. One second, he saw Donna lurching after him, her possessed face searing into his soul, her inhuman strength ripping him apart, and then he woke up from that nightmare and Hyde was pushing him up the stairs out of the basement.

"Okay…" Kevin was focused on the road, driving for the hotel and turning back to Long Beach. "Say it again. You rescued everyone?"

"It was 1978 again…" Hyde depressingly mumbled. "Eric and Donna were alive, so were Fez, Kelso and Jackie and I was pushing them up the stairs and out of the place…" He lapsed back into depression. He had beaten that place, and yet, it didn't matter. His friends were still gone.

"Hyde…" Valerie spoke up as she leaned to the front seat. "You were hallucinating. You were pushing _us_ out of that place!"

"But it seemed so real…" The former bad influence wondered why he was allowed to live again.

"You know…" Loren had lost a camera, three rolls of film and all the research on that place in the basement. "Some researchers believe that ghosts are trapped in time, and that they're just place memories getting replayed when the weather is right. Maybe you were back with them again… in spirit."

"I wasn't just with them…" Hyde looked up as Kevin drove off the interstate for the hotel. "I'm telling you… I got them out!"

"Jackie too?" Her eyes rounded in fear, Tammy was scared to death the demented diva was still inside her waiting to take over again.

"Maybe you did…" Kevin rolled to a stop at the front entrance of the Hotel Tipton in the city's theater district. "In spirit…" Bellboys rushed to assist them with smiles, and the doorman tipped his hat to them, but the five Point Place visitors were not quite as willing to be genial. They tried to be polite in return, but they were tired and emotionally exhausted.

"Excuse, Mr. Chapman…" Gerald Olin, the hotel manager, called to Loren.

"Yes…"

"Mr. Pritchett dropped this off for you." He produced the lost packet with his camera, film and research. Did Pritchett really drop that stuff off? He highly doubted it.

"Torch it." Loren turned back around and entered the elevator with Hyde and the others. On some level, he wanted it back, but he was scared to death of the price he might pay for it. He just wanted to forget about ghosts, time warps and Vannacutt Sanitarium all together. When the elevator opened again, Valerie and Tammy retreated to their room on the seventeenth floor, mumbling something about the food in the hotel while the guys wandered to their room down the hall from them. Hyde never even went to bed. Kevin took one room, Loren the other and he collapsed into the chair at the window overlooking the city, pulled out a flask of scotch and thumbed the photo of himself and his friends during happier times. He had a hard time saying good-bye to them. He lifted his flask toward the sky outside the window.

"Rest in peace, guys…" He drifted to sleep dreaming of jumping out the window to join them beyond. When he woke, sunlight was hitting him across the face and telling him to wake up. They had two hours to get back to his father's Cessna at the local airfield. Breakfast was brief, their hotel luxuries cursory and their feelings and confused and different. Point Place was eight hours away, and the only thing Hyde was relatively sure of was that he'd never return to Vannacutt Sanitarium.

For the plane ride home, almost everyone had started to relax and forget their memories of the deserted mental hospital on the cliffs overlooking the ocean. Kevin and Tammy were discussing their nuptials to occur in March, and Valerie was gently swirling and sipping wine trying to forget that the ghost of her sister had tried to kill her. Loren was wrapped up in the latest Stephen King book, correcting it for errors and occasionally looking up to take some crackers and cheese from the on-board snack tray. Upon landing in Wisconsin, Hyde pulled his overnight bag over his shoulder, thanked his new friends for coming with him and supporting him. In some way, they were exactly the people they had replaced. Loren represented Fez grown up and sure of himself, a person knowing where they were going. Kevin and Tracy were the love affair that Michael and Jackie never had but could have had and Valerie was Donna all over again, the type of girl Hyde might have had a chance without Eric around to take Donna from him. Hyde drove back to the Forman's house a bit more shattered than before and wishing he could have had better news. Struggling with his pack, he unlocked the door and wandered in tiredly. He was thinking of shaving off the beard.

"How you doing, Steven?" Eric's father sat in his chair and looked up from his newspaper. His extremely round head still bald and what little hair he had snowy white. "Have a nice trip?"

"I wouldn't call it that." Hyde dropped his bag off the landing at the front entryway. "You talking to me?"

"Of course, I'm talking to you…" Red actually grinned. He actually grinned! "It's not like you killed my son or something!" He rose from his seat chuckling and prodded the young man's shoulder as if they were friends.

"Did you get into Mrs. Forman's sherry or something?" Hyde was suspicious.

"Steven…" Eric's mother emerged from the kitchen and noticed him while grinning ecstatically happy. She couldn't control her giddy nature. Maybe the both of them had been in the sherry. Her little wiener dog, Schotzie, had raced from the room under her feet as she hugged Hyde and vanished into the den.

"Steven, you'll never guess who called!!!" Kitty was especially effervescent. "This morning Eric called. My son, Eric called me. Me!!! Oh, how I've missed him!!!"

"What a second…" Hyde shuddered a bit. "Eric called you???" He reacted confused and started wondering what was going on.

"He and Donna have been living in Ohio for the last fifteen years." Kitty giddily recalled a very happy and joyful phone car that had lasted over three hours. "He's a teacher, Donna's the editor of a newspaper and they've got two little girls. I'm a grandmother!!! They're coming home for Thanksgiving and Christmas!" She was so happy her little heart could barely hold it. She kept grinning wider and wider, her little round cheeks about to burst.

"Forman's alive??" Hyde froze. Maybe he did get them out of that place after all….

"I'm going to put my foot up his ass!" Red rolled his eyes and mulled a bit disgusted. "He vanishes on us for twenty years and then calls us out of the blue just because Donna convinces him to bury a feud he has with me. What did I ever do to that dumb-ass?"

"Well…" Kitty turned round upset. "You called him a dumb-ass!" Red looked up at her in disbelief.

"Wait a second…" Hyde was still reeling from the alterations to the timeline he had caused. If he had saved everyone from the hospital, why was he still in a fog over the last forty years, and if he had got them all out, why didn't they all just come back to Point Place with him and the others? Was it because they were still trapped in 1978 and he had escaped to the present? Did everyone survive? What about Kelso, Jackie and Fez?

"Forman's alive…" He still tried to figure it out in his head. "And he and Donna are married and living in Ohio? Who goes to live in Ohio?" He really started hating time travel. His cell phone started ringing on his belt. He took it and held it aloft.

"Please be Kelso, please be Kelso, please be Kelso…." He prayed into it as he paced the living room. "Kelso?"

"Hyde, you're not going to believe this…" It was Kevin Kelso, Michael's little brother, fresh from their surreal trip down the rabbit hole. "I think you really did somehow save the guys. I just got a phone call from Michael in New York City!"

"New York City???" Hyde sounded like the guy in the Pace Picanti TV Commercial. "He's in New York City???"

"He says he became a cop after high school!" Kevin paced through the living room of what had once been his parent's house and was now where he lived with Tammy. "He's working with the New York City Police… and get this, are you ready for this, Fez is an actor! The two of them have been living in an apartment off Forty-Fifth Street for almost twenty years!"

"Wait a second, wait a second…" Hyde turned his secret but crazy conversation away from the Formans and into Red's study on the other side of the staircase. "Donna and Eric are in Ohio, Kelso and Fez are in New York City… Did Kelso say anything about Jackie?"

"No, he didn't mention her." Kevin looked to Tammy. She was finally going to meet his brother. "Eric and Donna are in Ohio?"

"If I really did save everyone, and if everyone made it…" Hyde wondered while rubbing his head. "I wonder where that little psychopath is."

Far to the west on the southwest shore of California on the Pacific Palisades, the looming edifice of Vannacutt Sanitarium reached to the sun in the sky. The giant tombstone was the imposing memory of a demented surgeon consumed by personal demons. Dried leaves rattled through the courtyard and dead gardens. Vines choked off the old fountains, fallen branches littered the weed-filled yards and cars drove by under the cliffs in the shadow of the place. Dying trees swayed in the oceanic breezes blowing against the cliffs. Toward dusk, the incredible shadows reminded everyone around why it was called Haunted Hill. Deep inside the catacombs of the basement, open doors creaked on rusted hinges. Shadows moved around and the silent sounds of sobbing came from empty corners. Psychotic, possessed and dangerous, Jackie Burkhart walked through her home with long black skirts dragging behind her, her superhuman figure jutting proudly from her chest. Her hair was dark as a moonless night, her skin graveyard white and her lips blood red. Her pitch black eyes were a symbol of her possession, her long unholy vestments composed of living shadow and tainted dark energies churning and storming within and across her body. As she walked through, wheelchairs rolled out of her way, light bulbs lit up and exploded, doors slammed shut and the huge structure groaned from her powerful presence trying to explode outward from its walls. In this place, she could do anything she wanted, be anyone she wanted, become as tall as she wanted and control everything around her. As she turned back to the morgue, she paused… stepped back and listened from the darkness. She had heard something. There were noises that shouldn't belong. She thought she heard the voices of living people near her, their delicious life energies ready to be absorbed into her. Did she have more guests? She crawled and ascended up the wall with unnatural proclivity like a giant parasite once more becoming one the structure, her body sprawled across it flesh to concrete and plaster. The possessed diva ascended up to the ceiling, pulling her body attracted to the wall toward the archway with her legs and skirts spread out behind her. She crawled across the ceiling and traversed the length of the hall before hanging upside down from the vaulted ceiling and looking upon her guests with her eyes blinking over completely blackened irises. She looked up upon them mulling around confused and bathed in the light of the main chamber down from the stairs.

"Guys, guys…" Jackson Stewart called out. "Where the heck are we?" He looked around the room. His sister, Miley, and her blonde best friend, Lily Truscott, were standing to his left looking around them as their friend, Oliver Oaken, wandered off to the side to peer down a long dark corridor. Raven Baxter made a face which sparked her attitude. The twins Zack and Cody Martin were aimlessly walking through the area. Zack was a bit spooked, but wanting to race a wheelchair through the place. His brother, Cody, was reacting a bit more analytical; trying to rationalize how they got here. Blonde and attractive Lizzie McGuire moved closer to her friend, David Gordon. Raven-haired Chelsea Daniels spun round once after dusting her blue jeans off from the floor, and Keely Teslow stayed close to Phil Diffy looking for his computerized gadget which should have been at his belt. Where was it?! Blonde and beautiful, Maddie Fitzpatrick fussed with her hair a bit, pulling it into a ponytail to keep the cobwebs out of it as Eddie Thomas checked her over. Heiress London Tipton suddenly shot her hand up to respond to Jackson.

"How many chances do I get?" Her vacuous stunted mind thought Jackson was playing a game.

"London…" Maddie was never exactly helping her by indulging London's ignorance. "Try and get this through your head. We've been abducted by someone and dumped here!!!"

"Uh-uh…." Raven marched through the center of them forming her own opinion. "I ain't staying here. I'm finding the way out." She started wandering off in the wrong direction.

"Raven, don't be wandering off…" Chelsea went after her.

"Uh, uh… Jackson, is it?" Phil checked his name and tried to give some advice. "I don't think we should let them wander off."

"I agree…" David Gordon, know as "Gordo" by Lizzie, joined them. Lizzie huddled near Maddie and Keely trying to fight off the chill of the basement.

"Guys…" Oliver looked at Miley and Lily then back to Jackson and Phil. "I don't think we're alone here…" He thought he'd seen Jackie Burkhart in her dark succubus form with all her unholy power slipping from one dark room for another. An excited glimmer of evil from her eyes, a glint of light from her vampiric teeth, she looked at Phil then to Jackson beckoning to them to come and be a part of her. The group of confused teens gathered en masse at the opening of one of the dark halls. There was pitch black all around them. The shadowy expanse of endless halls and confusing corridors stretching out all around them, the location had been definitely created to stir fear and terror to all who dared to enter this place. Something was out in those shadowy halls, and she was very hungry…

END


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